[Commlist] New Book: Desiring the Bomb

My recent book, /Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and 
the Atomic Age/ from the University of Alabama Press. You can read more 
here:

http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Desiring-the-Bomb,6959.aspx

A description follows:

*A timely interdisciplinary study that applies psychoanalysis and the 
rhetorical tradition of the sublime to examine the cultural aftermath of 
the Atomic Age*

Every culture throughout history has obsessed over various “end of the 
world” scenarios. The dawn of the Atomic Age marked a new twist in this 
tale. For the first time, our species became aware of its capacity to 
deliberately destroy itself. Since that time the Bomb has served as an 
organizing metaphor, a symbol of human annihilation, a stand-in for the 
unspeakable void of extinction, and a discursive construct that 
challenges the limits of communication itself. The parallel fascination 
with and abhorrence of nuclear weapons has metastasized into a host of 
other end-of-the-world scenarios, from global pandemics and climate 
change to zombie uprisings and asteroid collisions.

/Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic 
Age/ explores these world-ending fantasies through the lens of 
psychoanalysis to reveal their implications for both contemporary 
apocalyptic culture and the operations of language itself. What accounts 
for the enduring power of the Bomb as a symbol? What does the prospect 
of annihilation suggest about language and its limits? Thoroughly 
researched and accessibly written, this study expands on the theories of 
Kenneth Burke, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and many others from a 
variety of disciplines to arrive at some answers to these questions.

Calum L. Matheson undertakes a series of case studies—including the 
Trinity test site, nuclear war games, urban shelter schemes, and 
contemporary survivalism—and argues that contending with the anxieties 
(individual, social, cultural, and political) born of the Atomic Age 
depends on rhetorical conceptions of the “real,” an order of experience 
that cannot be easily negotiated in language. Using aspects of media 
studies, rhetorical theory, and psychoanalysis, the author deftly 
engages the topics of Atomic Age survival, extinction, religion, and 
fantasy, along with their enduring cultural legacies, to develop an 
account of the Bomb as a signifier and to explore why some Americans 
have become fascinated with fantasies of nuclear warfare and narratives 
of postapocalyptic rebirth.

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